Re: Regarding Microtec

["Stanley R. Allen" <s_allen@hso.link.com>]

Rakesh Malhotra wrote:
> 
> Dear Editor
> 
> One thing interesting (and disappointing to me) in the article is the
> lack of any mention of Ada at all. 

I've noticed that most information about Ada in EETimes is
generally written by someone with no knowledge of the
language.  The last article I remember about Ada in EETimes
was called "Ada finds new life riding a Java wave" -- 
describing the Ada-to-JVM translation technology.  It
was such a sloppy job I was surprised that no one
complained; also, as you can tell by the article title,
the assumption was generally that Ada was/is "dead".

This is a common assumption in the pop computer
literature.  Case in point, the latest issue of RTC
magazine (Feb 1998), pg 93 has a notice announcing the
recent validation of the new Green Hills Ada compilers,
prefixed with the slightly astonished observation that
"ADA [sic] still takes its share of high reliability
software projects."

> As an aside: I do not know if this is an EE Times policy but I do not
> normally find mention of Ada based projects in your pages.  There is a
> lot of mention of C, C++, Embedded C++ and Java.

Y'know, the funny thing is that in practically every
issue of EETimes there are a number of Ada employment
opportunities advertised in the back pages.  Apparently
employers know they can reach Ada developers through
EETimes.

A lot of the articles you see in these kind of
magazines are written by people trying to sell the
products being described in the articles and sold on
the opposite page.  If Ada vendors advertised in these
rags, the editors would welcome articles written by
Ada vendors.

Another way to get articles into magazines like this
is to submit them yourself.  Richard Riehle does this
kind of thing often, and has made a point of telling
others in the Ada community how easy it is to do.
Editors are always looking for interesting material,
and usually are facing an unforgiving deadline; a
half-way decent article describing an interesting
technology or project which uses Ada may be just the
thing to the editor needs to fill up a few proof
sheets for the next issue.

I like Richard Riehle's approach: just do it, and
assume that nothing should stand in your way.  I
hope to imitate him some day soon by writing the
first Ada article in Linux Journal, as long as one
of you out there doesn't (or hasn't) beat me to the
punch!

-- 
Stanley Allen
mailto:s_allen@hso.link.com